By Mike Soto

I had never considered solitude and loneliness to be two sides of the same coin before. Then the pandemic came. The joy of being alone was lost on me. Instead, I became bad at entertaining myself.

New York had always been a place that felt like home, despite the love/hate relationship that I had with it. I thought, what better place to be entertained? So, while everyone else was fleeing the city, I moved back. I needed to connect, to be witnessed, to touch base. And in the way that sometimes happens in New York, things just worked. I was offered a room in a historic brownstone in Brooklyn with "a communal vision" and gave into nostalgic reveries about the only other time I’ve lived in such a setting.

When I was in college I lived with my closest friends in a two-story, five-bedroom house on Normal Street in Denton, Texas. I believe we each paid $325 a month. I had a bedroom and an office, where I read the books assigned to me by my lit professors. A window could be opened onto the roof of the patio, where I pretended to grow plants, but mostly stepped out to drink beer or smoke weed. There was a garage where we set up a ping pong table. Our epic battles (we were all overly competitive) flowed past midnight in the heat. Normal, the street, stretched a total of one block, between Scripture and Oak. Around the corner was "Howdy Doody," the convenience store where we would get tall boys, American Spirits (when they still had the endangered species cards), and the usual convenience store cuisine like powdered donuts and Hawaiian bread.

Thinking back on it, the gravity of what I was doing was also lost on me. I was pulled back into the orbit of New York—and I wanted to be back. But all my linchpins were up for grabs: Validation. Emotional support. Financial stability. I was overwhelmed and it only seemed fitting that I’d landed in this historic house—and I used every corner. A stoop café where I read and wrote in the morning and a garden for dusk. A parlor when I needed to stand under a chandelier and feel like everything was in the right place. Living in this brownstone seemed like a fortuitous step toward something grand, and away from that creeping loneliness.

There was also an assisted living facility called "Skyview" adjacent to the house on Normal. It looked like a beige relic from the seventies. There was a walled off area around its perimeter that I could see through a door of metal bars. It resembled a loading dock. One resident in particular would stand at the gate and wait for someone to walk past so he could throw his hat through the bars. If I happened to walk by, I would pick his hat off of the ground and return it to him. I think he just wanted someone to say hello, and I knew that feeling, so I didn't mind taking a detour on my way home from Howdy Doody.

We did a lot of things in that house. We listened to Bob Dylan and talked about poetry. We talked about love. We had marathon two-on-two matches of nerf basketball.

One morning in the parlor of the brownstone my landlord, who shared the communal living space, asked me to leave. She refused to explain why. My three other roommates had already been briefed.

Her twin sister had been staying with us for the month and there had been days of communal anxiety over her sister’s lost phone, which was also her wallet. I asked if she thought I took it. The particular shrug of her shoulders, the long, resigned “I don’t know,” was an unmistakable yes. I said I wouldn't stay where I'm not wanted, where I've been accused of stealing without evidence. Where I won't be heard.

There must have been a moment when her sister had made up her mind: it was me. Maybe the wheels had been turning in their twin mind(s) for several nights in the room they shared. What made them think it was me: Race? Gender? Cranium structure? I am a tall Mexican-American male. Maybe my facial hair is intimidating. Maybe I don’t smile enough. My other roommates in the house included two Jewish women in their twenties and a white guy.

I guess it had to be me.

I felt like an hourglass had been turned and the sand was marking my dwindling time in the house. I tried to keep it cool, even as I noticed the hinges coming undone. Days later I learned through my roommates that the sisters also suspected me of stealing a vintage kimono. And a Teflon skillet.

In the Normal Street house there were two brothers. The elder brother had introduced me to the group and was my first true peer as an adult, someone who humored my first aspirations as a writer. Coming from an "underserved" neighborhood of chronically low expectations, he helped make my dreams feel normal. The younger brother lived downstairs, which was probably for the best since he played drums and rearranged the furniture in his room obsessively. He had pages with syntax trees taped to his walls, and he always seemed to become everyone's little brother, including my own. The third roommate came from Bogota, Colombia, to do his doctorate in classical guitar. He was a little older and added an air of wisdom to the house. He was also the first college-educated person I could speak to in Spanish.

It seemed inevitable that the people I lived with on Normal would become my closest friends, but this connection seems so time-bound now, so specific to the naivete of that era. I suppose it’s foolish to want to recreate this, but I don't know anyone who doesn't long for the camaraderie of their college days.

After I was asked to leave, I met my roommates at a bar every night to get drunk. We checked in and comforted each other and speculated on the ins and outs of why this was all happening. We had all just come together as roommates, and now it was over.

One night a roommate texted to let me know the sisters were thinking of getting the police involved. I panicked. If it came down to my word against the word of two wealthy white women, I was going to jail. It didn't matter if I was innocent or not. By the time the Sunday brunch crowds settled in to the restaurant across the street the next morning, I was gone.

My favorite part of our house on Normal was a small bamboo thicket that had grown to occupy a corner of the back yard. My friends had made a secret space we called the “bamboo room” by burrowing through the stalks and chopping down the ones in the center with a kitchen knife. They placed a single stool in the middle of this small clearing. The path to get there was only known by us, and even then, we would have to snake through the tight stalks to get to the room.

One night I stayed for an unusually long time because the moonlight seemed like it belonged to the room itself. I stayed so long that the thicket filled with birds that roosted there overnight. By the time I got up to make my way back, the thicket was teeming with sleeping birds. As I rattled thru the bamboo, I startled them awake, setting off a commotion that suddenly surrounded me. There was a feeling of ecstasy in being in the middle of that chaos. Being connected to it.

I couldn’t help but laugh until I found myself standing outside of the thicket, where I took a moment to listen to the birds as they settled back in for the night.

Bio:

Mike Soto is the author of the chapbooks, Beyond The Shadow’s Ink and Dallas Spleen. His debut collection of poetry, A Grave Is Given Supper, was published by Deep Vellum and was adapted for the stage in a unique collaboration of literary theatre with Teatro Dallas, with recent performances in New Ohio Theatre’s ICE Factory in New York in July of 2021.